New Pirates of the Caribbean: Growing instability in Venezuela

Jeremy McDermott, co-director of Insight Crime, a nonprofit that studies organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean, has called the coast of Venezuela “criminal chaos”. The incidents are not just low-level scavenging but often orchestrated, violent and at times lethal pirate attacks. One such act saw at least a dozen fisherman killed in May of last year. Four boats travelling from neighbouring Guyana to Suriname were attacked by pirates in what the Guyanese President described as a “massacre”. More…